• Mohammad Reza Masjedi, Parisa Adimi Naghan, Shervin Taslimi, Mahmoud Yousefifard, Seyyed Meisam Ebrahimi, Adnan Khosravi, Shirin Karimi, Mostafa Hosseini, and Esmaeil Mortaz.
• Clinical Tuberculosis Epidemiology Research Center, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
• Respiration. 2013 Jan 1;85(2):112-8.

BackgroundLung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide, and half of all incident lung cancers are believed to occur in the developing countries, including Iran.ObjectiveWe investigated the association of opium with the risk of lung cancer in a case-control study.MethodsWe enrolled 242 cases and 484 matched controls in this study. A questionnaire was developed, containing questions on basic demographic characteristics, as well as lifelong history of smoking cigarettes, exposure to passive smoking, opium use and alcohol consumption. For smoking cigarettes and opium and also oral opium intake frequency, duration and cumulative use were categorized into three groups: no use, low use and high use. Conditional logistic regression was used to calculate the odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs).ResultsMultivariate analysis in men showed that after adjusting for the effect of ethnicity, education and pack years of smoking cigarettes, smoking opium remained as a significant independent risk factor with an OR of 3.1 (95% CI 1.2-8.1). In addition, concomitant heavy smoking of cigarettes and opium dramatically increased the risk of lung cancer to an OR of 35.0 (95% CI 11.4-107.9).ConclusionThis study demonstrated that smoking opium is associated with a high risk of lung cancer as an independent risk factor.Copyright © 2012 S. Karger AG, Basel.

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